Slow Burn 07 (2007)

"Beach blends all the performing styles smoothly: LL's blithe coolness, Blalock's sultry ambiguity, Liotta's slow-boiling intensity...  Lawrence Toppman, Charlotte Observer
"...[a] sprightly fusion of "The Usual Suspects" and the "Tragic Mulatto"...  Scott Brown, Entertainment Weekly

Editor's Note In director/writer Wayne Beach's neo-noir thriller, SLOW BURN, various characters on both sides of the law collide in an unnamed city. District Attorney Ford Cole (Ray Liotta) is campaigning to become mayor, but his assistant D.A. and lover, Nora Timmer (a sultry Jolene Blalock, best known for her stint on the STAR TREK series ENTERPRISE), finds herself implicated in the murder of a record-store employee (Mekhi Phifer), seriously jeopardizing her boss's bid. As evidence about the incident comes to light, other suspects surface, including the mysterious Luther Pinks (LL Cool J, born James Todd Smith), along with a determined reporter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), creating a complex web of deceit. Filmed in 2003 but not officially released until 2007, SLOW BURN may have best been showcased as a TV movie, but its considerable star power (Liotta, Smith, etc.) helps to elevate it above similar small-screen fare. Beach is a veteran screenwriter (with THE ART OF WAR and MURDER AT 1600, both starring Wesley Snipes, on his resume), Beach clearly knows how to set up a suspenseful mystery, and his impressive cast (which includes always-outstanding character actors Ejiofor and Bruce McGill) gamely follows his twists and turns. Although the movie is heavily indebted to THE USUAL SUSPECTS it stands on its own as a decent, if convoluted, crime drama.

	Bruce McGill
	Chiwetel Ejiofor
	Guy Torry
	Jolene Blalock
	LL Cool J
	Mekhi Phifer
	Ray Liotta
	Taye Diggs
	Anthony Walton - Based On Story By
	Jeff Rona - Original Music By
	Kristina Boden - Editor
	Paul Zucker - Editor
	Sidney Kimmel - Producer
	Stavros Evangelou - Art Director
	Stephen Break - Executive Producer
	Tim Galvin - Production Designer
	Wally Pfister - Cinematographer
	Wayne Beach - Director
	Wayne Beach - Writer

Reel.com 8 of 10
Slow Burn is the kind of elaborately plotted and unrealistic thriller for which the term "suspension of disbelief" was invented. Buying into its numerous plot twists depends on several unlikely assumptions, the most contrived of which is that the people in the movie will behave in ways that go against their own self-interest in order to make a better story for you, the viewer. The illegal scheme at the core of the film is so needlessly complicated and risky that no criminal with a brain would actually try it, and throughout Slow Burn characters who we've been told are at the top of their professions--an ace district attorney, an elusive gangster, etc.--make dumb mistakes just so that the plot can keep moving forward. Yet that plot is, in its own way, rather satisfying, and the uniformly solid performances and fast pace make Slow Burn a very entertaining B-movie...Ultimately, Slow Burn will probably play better at home, where its strengths will be more evident when compared with the less clever and more amateurishly acted variations on the same themes that clog up late-night premium cable line-ups...It's a movie that has to be accepted on its own somewhat modest terms to work, but if one can suspend that pesky disbelief for ninety minutes, it's an awful lot of fun. - Jim Hemphill